Just Sleep - Bedtime Stories for Adults · Bedtime Stories with Taesha Glasgow

Three Men in A Boat: The Food Question

·41 min·4 clips

How did paraffin oil saturate an entire town and ruin the moonbeams during a boating trip?

The episode begins with host Tayshia’s brief welcome and a note that no ads will run during or after the story, before settling into a slow, deliberate reading of two chapters from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. Chapter 4, titled The Food Question, opens with the three friends—George, Harris, and the narrator—debating what to bring on their Thames boating holiday. They agree to ban paraffin oil after a previous trip where it seemed to permeate everything from the food to the moonbeams. The discussion of what not to bring generates the episode’s longest comic set-piece: the narrator recalls a friend who asked him to transport two extremely ripe, powerful cheeses from Liverpool to London. The cheeses startle a cab horse into a brief gallop, clear an entire railway carriage of passengers one by one, and force the narrator to ride alone from Crewe to London. Once delivered to the friend’s house, the cheeses drive the man’s wife out to a hotel. The husband eventually tries throwing them in a canal, leaving them in a parish mortuary, and finally burying them at a seaside town, which inadvertently becomes famous for its bracing sea air. Back to the packing, the narrator insists on handling it himself, only to forget his boots and then spend considerable time hunting for his toothbrush before finding it inside a boot. George and Harris then take over the hamper packing with chaotic results: a cup is broken immediately, strawberry jam is squashed onto the tomatoes, George treads on the butter, and Harris sits on the butter. The dog Montmorency contributes by sitting on everything, sticking his leg in the jam, and killing three lemons under the impression they are rats. Chapter 5 opens the next morning with all three men having overslept by hours. George is found still in bed and is roused by having his covers thrown off and landing in a pre-positioned bath. At Waterloo station, the group cannot find their train, receiving conflicting directions from porters, the stationmaster, and the traffic superintendent before bribing the engine driver to agree he is the 11:05 to Kingston. They later learn they traveled on the Exeter Mail. The episode ends as the boat is loaded and they push off from Kingston onto the Thames.

As heard by us

A dry packing comedy that turns small annoyances into bedtime-ready chaos.

This chapter makes a simple packing job feel like a dry, steadily worsening comic mess. George's practical push for breakfast gear, the refusal of oil, and the ever-growing stack of plates, cups, bottles, pies, stoves, and cakes keep the humor moving by accumulation, while the…

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Why you'd press play

When you want Victorian packing chaos to blur into sleep.

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